Snapchat’s AI upgrade makes you look as old as its features feel
Snapchat’s AI experiments are reaching a new level of maturity, as evidenced by the new AI Lens that lets you see what you might look like in the future. Aging your appearance is just a taste of the improved AI coming to Snapchat, as the company was eager to show off how AI is increasingly becoming integrated into its platform, including the latest version of the Spectacles.
The most notable new feature is “My Selfie,” which uses AI and photos of you to produce a digital avatar based on your selfies. You can then ask the social media app to create AI-generated images and place your virtual self into them.
It’s a lot like Meta’s “Imagine” feature, which also creates an AI-generated version of you to embed in AI-generated images. A bonus of the Snapchat version is that you can generate images of yourself and your friends if they’ve created an AI avatar and opted into the program.
If you subscribe to Snapchat+, your real-life experiences with friends will also get an AI upgrade. Snapchat has improved its Memories feature for all users with collages and videos. But with Snapchat+, you’ll also get more AI-generated information in the form of captions and composite Lenses for your old photos, all of which add detail and manipulate your images in new ways.
AI Lens Lifespan
Information is also key to Snapchat’s enhanced My AI chatbot, which uses ChatGPT-based models to converse. Snap announced that it’s enhancing the chatbot’s problem-solving capabilities with visual processing. That means the bot can now interpret images, answer questions about parking regulations based on an image of a sign, identify plants based on a photo you take and even translate text from another language. Like the AI avatar, this feature might also sound familiar if you’ve used ChatGPT’s image features or the Gemini-powered Google Lens.
If you’re feeling creative but aren’t a fan of the Lens that makes you look old, there are plenty of options for you in the new AI-powered tools in Lens Studio. The new Easy Lens tool lets you design a Lens by writing a text prompt that can theoretically do anything you can imagine from a Snapchat filter.
For more advanced creators, the GenAI Suite has several new tools, including Body Morph, which produces three-dimensional characters and outfits based on text prompts or uploaded images. There’s also the new Animation Blending feature, which combines multiple animation clips into smooth motion.